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As college tuitions continue to increase faster than inflation,
the value of a college education is subject of intense debate. Is
it worth it?

While studies suggest that yes, in most cases, it still pays to go
get a college education, the prospect of taking on tens of
thousands in student loans to pay for a degree can feel like a
ridiculous gamble. After all, in our still shaky economy, a
degree does not guarantee a job.

U.S. workers attitudes towards higher education reflect this
conflicted reality, according to a recent survey by career
website Glassdoor. While 82 percent of U.S. college educated
employees believe that their level of education has helped their
careers, a sizeable 48 percent of them either strongly agree or
agree with the statement 'My specific degree is not very relevant
to the job I do today/the most recent job I've held.'

And while a degree may open doors, it’s not a trump card. Over 3
in 4 college educated workers surveyed agreed with the statement
“Employers value work experience more than education,” and
somewhat surprisingly (or comfortingly, depending on your
perspective) 80 percent of working college graduates polled said
they’d never been asked about their GPA in an interview.

The Glassdoor survey was conducted online by Harris Interactive
in March and surveyed 2,059 adults ages 18 and older, out of
which 996 were employed full time or part time. Out of all the
respondents, 39 percent had a college degree, 20 percent had
completed some college, 33 percent had just a high school diploma
and 8 percent completed a job specific training program after
high school. Age-wise, here's the breakdown for all respondents:
18 to 34-year-olds (28 percent), 35 to 44-years (16 percent), 45
to 55-years (19 percent), 55-64-years old (18 percent) and those
over the age of 65-years (19 percent).

While a degree is can be prerequisite for many white-collar jobs,
a college education rarely adequately prepares graduates for the
reality of the workforce says Rusty Rueff, a Glassdoor career and
workplace expert. “It’s not exactly a secret that when you send
in your resume, it’s scanned by a machine to find the initials BA
or BS,” he says. Often, it’s the degree that’s important, not the
major.

As a result, he finds, companies hire individuals who have a
college degree but are lacking in relevant industry-specific
skills. Through internal training, external boot camps, or simply
hiring more experienced employees, companies are footing the bill
to close this education gap.

Eventually corporate America will realize that it is more
cost-efficient to hire candidates with suitable industry-specific
experience, rather than focusing solely on a bachelor’s degree,
he predicts. And when that happens, we’ll see a seismic shift in
our national approach to education: less reliance on traditional
four-year colleges, and more interest in online education as well
as apprenticeship and two-year training programs.

The Glassdoor survey supports this sentiment. Seventy-two percent
of surveyed employees – including 64 percent of those with a
college degree – agreed with the statement “I believe training
programs or apprenticeships to acquire specific skills are more
valuable than pursuing a degree.”

Still, until companies stop using a bachelor’s degree at a
four-year intuition as a litmus test, swapping a college degree
for an alternative approach to education after high school
is a risky bet.

He also hopes that as millennials – a generation intimately
familiar with the burden of student debt – begin to infiltrate
middle and upper management, they will value and reward
alternative forms of higher education, including apprenticeships
and online degrees.

“For the longest time, the easiest way to decide whether or not
someone was qualified was whether or not he or she had a college
degree,” Rueff says. He’d like to see that change.